Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning.

This is Wednesday, August 20th.

I had to check to see what day was.

Um it's um this is a health and safety committee.

My name is Daryl Watts, and I'm honored to serve as a city council member representing all of the flying district nine.

Um, we have a uh a brief but powerful uh briefing uh meetings today on health and safety.

We have two briefings and then uh four consent items before we go into the presentations.

Let me turn it over to the city council members uh to introduce themselves and we'll start on the run.

Uh good morning everyone, Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Hi everybody, Sedana Gonzalez, one of your council members at large.

Good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Good morning, Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

Good morning, everyone.

I believe that council member Perry is joining us virtually.

I just wanted to check in to see if the council member is online.

Doesn't appear that she's on, so why don't I turn it over to our briefings?

And once council member comes, we'll announce her.

We have two briefings.

First, Denver Health Housing Outreach Partnerships and Engagement.

I turn it over to Stephanie and team.

Please introduce yourselves and then uh the floor is yours.

Um good morning, everyone.

Um, thank you to Councilman uh Watson and the entire um council for allowing us to come and share about our work today.

My name is Dr.

Sarah Stella.

I am an internal medicine physician and hospitalist um at Denver Health where I practiced for the last uh 18 years in the inpatient setting.

Um, and we are excited to share with you about our how Denver Health partners to address homelessness today.

I'm gonna let my co-presenters and colleagues introduce themselves.

My name is Mara Prandy Abrams.

I'm the operations manager of patient flow and the co-director of our hope program.

Hello, uh, my name is Tom Gray.

I'm a project coordinator at Denver Health, sitting within the Office of Research and uh coordinator on this uh this hope team.

Um so I just want to start first by telling a story.

So um at Denver Health, our patients are our reason for being, our reason for existing.

Um, and taking care of um our patients has been um such a pleasure.

They've given me so much more than um I've given them.

I want to tell you about a patient uh today named Mr.

D.

It's a patient that I took care of a couple times over the course of the past year, who um illustrates for me why I uh work on this intersection of housing and health, and the importance of Denver Health as an access point for um housing and other supports in Denver's homelessness response system and the value of partnerships.

So, Mr.

D was a gentleman, he was in his mid-50s, um, has um poorly controlled diabetes, has been living um unsheltered for about the past five years.

Uh, two of those years with uh a cane and then a walker uh and finally a wheelchair.

Um and so Mr.

D was had multiple admissions to Denver Health over the past year for limb-threatening infections requiring amputations.

Um, and I saw him on two of those visits, and over time he was just getting more and more um frail as he was losing um parts of his foot and ultimately his his leg.

Um, I use this case because it also uh he was also someone that had a lot of challenges with accessing um homeless services in the traditional way.

So he had a lot of difficulty with um being able to um access uh congregate shelters.

Um, he also had significant barriers, and um to be able to access subacute rehabilitation, which um would have been appropriate after surgery, but was not covered by Medicaid.

Um, this patient um I was examining him one day.

He had an ulceration on the bottom of his foot, which had progressed to bone.

He um I asked him while I was examining him: hey, are you working with anybody um on housing?

Do you have any prospects for housing?

And he said, he looked at me and he just said simply, Doc, I just keep falling through the cracks.

And that for me is why I do this work and why we all are here today.

And so when patients like Mr.

D fall through the cracks, Denver Health is there to catch them.

And in 2024 alone, we cared for 16,000 patients who collectively had almost 80,000 visits across our integrated health system.